Scientific methods colored by bias

Samuel George Morton loved the human skull like no other American scientist ever had. In his lifetime, he collected more than 1,000 of them from all over the world, and measured them with meticulous care.

In the span from one jawbone to the other, from eye socket to eye socket, from the occipital bones to the mastoid processes, from the foramen magnum to the nasal aperture, Morton saw revealed in the skull all the wonders of human difference.

He believed measurements of the skull determined a wide range of human qualities, including: "Self-esteem, conscientiousness, firmness, veneration and marvelousness," he wrote. Each quality was carefully assigned a number and recorded in detailed tables.

Most importantly, Morton demonstrated that measurements of the skull's size determined who were the most superior people in the world (Europeans like himself), who were the most inferior (Africans), and the rank of everyone in between. His scientific work came to be known as craniometry.

Morton was regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent anatomists, revered among many American and European peers and successors. His life's work was published in three volumes between 1839 and 1849.

But his fundamental view that Europeans had larger skulls than anyone else - a view that would hold sway until well into the 20th century - was a fantasy.

The record shows that Morton had unconsciously interpreted his measurements so that they proved the myth he believed to be true all along - that Europeans were superior.

He was not alone.

TALKING HEADS

How much "marvelousness" does your skull have? The skull of a Swiss man pictured here, from the studies of 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton, had a lot of "marvelousness," along with an abundance of self-esteem, hope and benevolence.

Wierd science: Scientist in the 19th century believed they could reveal all of a person's secrets by deciphering his skull with meticulous measurements. Morton's primary contention - that European superiority was proved by measurements showing that they had larger skulls than Africans - was based on his study of more than 1,000 skulls. It held sway until well into the 20th century. It was wrong.

Source: 'Crania Americana,' 1839

The development of anthropology, biology and anatomical science throughout the 19th century was in most respects the birth of the science of race. And invariably, the study of the human skull illuminated what were considered racial differences for European scientists.

In virtually every instance, skull studies were used in the service of racism to prove "biological" differences between black and white, with white always on top. When the data did not support the division, white scientists routinely shifted and redefined the criteria until the conclusions fit the assumptions, scholars say.

Harvard University biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, who uncovered the flaws in Morton's data in his 1981 book, "The Mismeasure of Man," also documents several other studies that went astray.

Typical was a study by Robert Bennett Bean, a Virginia physician. In 1906, Bean published an article reporting his measurements of the frontal lobes and rear lobes of brains of both black and white cadavers.

Scientists at the time considered the difference important because higher brain functions reside in the front of the brain, and lower motor functions in the rear.

Bean found that in virtually every case, white cadavers had larger frontal lobes than black cadavers. He concluded that white people were inherently more intelligent, and black people inherently better at menial labor - using science to uphold the prevailing social view.

Bean failed to mention one conclusion of his research that he found disturbing: the brains of his black and white cadavers were roughly the same size - contradicting the data meticulously gathered by Morton and long accepted by virtually everyone, that the brains of black people were smaller.

But Bean explained this away in an appendix. His logic went something like this: All the brains he gathered had been donated to medical schools; black families cared for their dead less than white families; thus, Bean surmised, his black cadavers actually represented the entire socioeconomic and intellectual range of black people, while his white cadavers only represented the poorest and least intelligent white people.

Therefore, Bean concluded, even the highest class of black people was really no better than the lowest class of white people.

A subsequent study by another scientist who performed the same brain measurements as Bean on the same brains showed no difference in brain measurements between black and white subjects. In the second study, the researchers measured the brains before they knew whether the brain was from a black person or a white person. Bean had known which were which before his measurements.

Bizarre logic like Bean's was typical, and took many forms.

For example, Etienne Serres, a French anatomist, theorized in the 1860s that the length from the navel to the base of the penis was longer in male European adults than in any other races. This proved that Europeans were superior, since such a distance was shortest in children, and other races were thus closer in intellect to children than were Europeans.

Other studies focused on the comparative positions of various parts of the brain or skull, and they, too, routinely went to absurd lengths to maintain the superiority of white people.

"Ever since the European voyages of exploration brought them into contact with peoples of color who culturally were quite distinct, Westerners have been conditioned to think about racial aliens in terms of differences rather than similarities," said John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas at Austin who has written and taught about race and culture. "It's a very elemental point, but it's easy to overlook what a powerful tendency this is."

Indeed, racial differences were so cherished by Europeans that they easily survived the most profound shift in the history of the human sciences - the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" in 1859.

Before Darwin's work and the emergence of the theory of evolution, most scientists applied a biblical interpretation to the world.

In this view, all human "races" had degenerated from the ideal embodied in Adam and Eve. In order to maintain white superiority, European scientists concluded that white people had fallen the shortest distance, black people the greatest distance.

Darwin's theory of evolution, and the mass of data that rapidly gathered around it, turned the scientific world on its head. But it did nothing to damage the notion of European racial superiority.

If scientists had to live in world in which humankind had evolved from lesser beings, so be it. It's just that Europeans had evolved the furthest, and Africans had evolved the least.

Rather than traveling the shortest route down the ladder from Adam and Eve, Europeans had covered the greatest distance upward from animals. Or as Gould put it, "Heads, I'm superior: Tails, you're inferior."

British evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way after the American Civil War: "It is simply incredible that (the black man) . . . will be able to compete with his bigger brained and smaller jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. . . . The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins."

Science in the 19th century did not exist in a social vacuum. Most of the ideas advanced by scientists invariably made their way into the social consciousness of the nation, just as the conclusions of scientists were subject to the influence of their own social biases.

The threads of 19th century scientific racism weave their way through American culture into the 20th century.

In his book, Gould cited examples of popular praise for Samuel Morton after Morton's death in 1851. "Probably no scientific man enjoyed a higher reputation among scholars throughout the world than Dr. Morton," wrote the New York Tribune.

And the prestigious Charleston Medical Journal wrote, "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."

Morton in his book "Crania Americana" referred to Africans as "remarkably stupid and slothful . . . noted for indolence, deception and falsehood. . . . Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not unfrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty."

More than 20 years later, a reading textbook for Southern schoolchildren described the races. It said of Africans, "They are slothful and vicious, but possess little cunning. They are very cruel to each other, and when they have war, they sell their prisoners to white people for slaves."

The enduring quality of Morton's work on brain size is apparent even later. For example, the 1964 Encyclopaedia Britannica lists "a small brain in relation to their size" as a characteristic of black people.

And in the findings of a 1992 Runners World magazine article on the supposed superiority of African athletes, it is hard to escape the echoes of Robert Bennett Bean and other scientists who "proved" that black people were superior at physical exertion, white people at higher brain functions:

"Where pure explosive power - that is, sprinting and jumping - are required for excellence in sport, blacks of West African heritage will excel," the article concluded. "The more a sport moves away from speed and toward technique and other prerequisites, like hand-eye coordination, the more other racial groups will find themselves on a level playing field."